At the risk of dating myself here, do you remember the television show, CHiPs? If you recall, the show loosely followed the adventures of the California Highway Patrol. In reality, the show existed as an exploitation vehicle for whatever fad-of-the-week happened to be popular. Windsurfing? You can bet our intrepid cops will have to deal with a group of windsurfing thieves. Off-road racing? It's a sure thing that John will enter his truck in a race.

The point is, the show CHiPs perfectly illustrates Hollywood's follow-the-leader mentality. Except in Hollywood, it never just ends with one episode or film. There is a ripple effect. The instant a fad-specific film splashes onto the scene, it won't take long for the ripple effect to produce scores of mediocre, hastily pasted-together also-rans.

Extreme Ops is just such a ripple.

The pitch for the film likely went a lot like this: "Let's make a movie about a bunch of extreme sports fanatics who get to use their skiing and snowboarding skills to outwit a bunch of bad guys."

Notice that within that pitch there is no mention of motivation or emotional content of any sort. And therein lies the problem with this bland movie.

The film opens with the shooting of a commercial. The product is apparently a new high-tech digital camcorder capable of withstanding an extreme lifestyle. The finale of the commercial is to showcase a gold-medalist skier out-racing an avalanche. We're informed that there is no longer a budget for creating the avalanche as a special effect, so the film crew must find a real location and a real avalanche. We are expected to believe that it is less expensive to fly the film crew half way around the world, pay for the necessary insurance (can you get avalanche insurance?), and cover any potential lawsuits should the gold-medal winning skier fail to outrun said avalanche, than it would be to hire a computer geek with Lightwave to create a digital avalanche.

Our "Extreme Operators" find themselves heading for the Austrian-Serbian border, presumably because everywhere else in the world realizes how idiotic it is to purposely create an avalanche for a film commercial. For reasons that only exist within the bounderies of film logic, our group abandons their hotel in favor of an unfinished resort on top of a mountain.

Now, this next bit is important because if you happen to blink during the film, or (more likely) you are starting to doze off, you may not catch the fact that the film's bad guys are using the incomplete resort as their hideout. I wish I could tell you more about the bad guys, but I can't for the simple reason that the plot never seems to think it's important enough to offer much information on them. We are told that the chief bad guy is a wanted war criminal who has staged his own death. Other than that, they are a blank slate.

Here's the part that I don't get (well, actually there are a lot of things in this movie I don't get, but this is the big one): If I'm a wanted criminal, I would think that the last thing I'd do is invite a film crew into my hideout. And yet, that is exactly what these criminals do -- with open arms, no less. In fact, if you missed the poorly introduced plot point that these are criminals, you wouldn't suspect anything odd at all. And then suddenly in the last 20 minutes of the film, as though the filmmakers finally realized they were supposed to be making an action-thriller, the bad guys get all bent out of shape when they realize the film crew might have captured them on video and bullets start flying and a chase ensues.

Even then, there is very little sense of peril. Not only have the filmmakers failed to inspire any sense of urgency, but these criminal are so inept that our heroes could have been bunny slope material and still we feel they could have gotten away. To make matters worse, the "extreme" skiing we're offered is anything but. The directing is so sloppy that even the climactic avalanche scene is yawn-inspiring and most of the extreme stunts portrayed in film are so obviosly faked than any excitement value is stripped away (which is ironic, since the main character, played by Rufus Sewell, gives an emphatic speach early in the film about how he won't tolerate special effects stunts that defy reality).

I can't say that I hated this film, because hate is an emotion and Extreme Ops is simply incapable of inspiring any emotional response. The film is a flavorless, vapid and, dare I say, typical example of the Hollywood mentality.